Heirlooms: Pearls
by Rae Kelly
Summary: Everything has a story…and so did the simple strand of pearls she held in her hand. But what intrigued her more than the obviously old necklace, was the list of names and dates on the paper, yellowed with age, lying in the bottom of the faded jewel case.
1. Prologue

Everything has a story…and so did the simple strand of pearls she held in her hand

Everything has a story…and so did the simple strand of pearls she held in her hand. But what intrigued her more than the obviously old necklace, was the list of names and dates on the paper, yellowed with age, lying in the bottom of the faded jewel case. Each line was written with a different hand, perhaps even by the woman listed there.

A great-aunt on her mother's side of the family had given the old jewel case to her. All she had know about her mother's family was that her grandfather had died in Vietnam when her mother was just a baby and her grandmother about the time she herself had been born. She didn't know anything about her father and her own mother had died when she was six. After that she had been placed into the foster care system to be bounced from one home to another until she had turned eighteen. As soon as she was out, she began looking for family members. All she had been able to find was a great-aunt, her grandfather's twin sister, whose only son had died tragically as a young man.

As she looked over the names on the paper, she began to grow more curious about the women listed there. Were these women her family? What was their relationship to her? Did the box of papers and photographs sent by her aunt's lawyer hold the answers to her questions about her family? Only time would tell, but she would start with the last name on the list: her great-aunt Riley.


	2. Riley Ann Matthews

My twin brother Tyler and I never really got to know our mother's family. Dad played baseball until his knee gave out and then he started coaching…and that meant we went wherever he did. Mom was…she was his biggest fan and never missed a game. Not even we they were on the road. She would load us up in the car and take us to the games. I can't say that I hated baseball, but it never really interested me. Tyler was pretty much the same way. We went to the games and we cheered, because it was expected of us, but we would rather have had Dad at home and not have to move every couple of years.

We had heard stories about Mom's family and met several of them once or twice, but to us it was never really enough. We were jealous of our cousins and the close relationship they had not only with each other but with grandparents, aunts and uncles as well. I asked about going one summer, but Mom told me that we had cheer for Dad. To us family vacation meant Spring Training and a weekend trip was for a road game. Since baseball season interfered with school, Mom taught us herself.

Tyler was drafted to go fight in Vietnam shortly after we turned eighteen and I enlisted as an ambulance driver. If he was going, then I was going to go too. I was not about to be left at home to deal with Mom and Dad alone. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there…words could not describe…

As soon as Tyler and I had a long enough leave we went home. He only stayed one night with our parents, opting instead to go see an old sweetheart. I found out nearly a year later that she had given birth to a child…Tyler's daughter.

Ty never got the chance to see or hold his daughter. His helicopter went down one day on a routine mission. There were no survivors. My ambulance happened to be one of the ones that responded to the scene. When they pulled his body from the wreckage, I knelt beside him and held my twin close as I sobbed. The others must have understood because no one tried to stop me or pull me away. I was later given permission to take my brother's body home. The funeral was attending by Mom and Dad's baseball friends and a few family members that I barely remembered. I tried to go see Tyler's daughter, but her mother had taken her and disappeared, leaving no word of where she was going.

As soon as I returned to Vietnam, I threw myself into my work, trying to save as many of those soldiers as I could. I didn't want any more children to loose their daddies…not on my watch. My days off were spent working in a local orphanage where I grew to love the children. They were victims of this bloody war as much as Tyler was.

One day I went to the orphanage I found the building burned and many of the children I had come to adore had been killed. You see, many of these innocents were the children of Vietnamese women and American soldiers, given up at birth. Barely able to see through my tears, I turned to go back to my base for help in burying them when I heard a soft mewing sound. Under the dead bodies of one of the nurses, I found a baby boy…alive, but barely. Scooping him up into my arms, I ran as fast as I could for the base. The baby, who I called Tyler, pulled through and I began the process of trying to officially adopting him by claiming that he was my brother's child. After months and months and miles of red tape, little Tyler was mine and I was allowed to take him home.

I knew it wouldn't be easy raising this child in the States, but I knew his little life had been spared for a reason…and he had given meaning to mine once again. In this first few days after I brought him to the base I was at his side every spare minutes…holding him, talking to him, changing him…anything that needed to be done. I poured my life into saving his.

While I was in Vietnam, I corresponded with one of the few friends I had while growing up…the son of another baseball player. He had done his time in Vietnam and lost his leg. When my brother died, he had been there for the funeral to support me and it had been his strong arm that had held me as I sobbed my way through the day. I had begun to value his friendship more than I valued my relationship with my parents. When I found out that I was bringing my son home to the State, I called Joe and he met me at the airport, asking if he could marry me. Up until that moment I had not realized that I did love him. We were married a few weeks later in a simple ceremony in his family's home. My parents came and gave me the pearls that my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother had all worn on their wedding days. It was strange to wear something that had been such a part of my family history when I didn't really feel like part of that family myself.


	3. Keely Grace Conlon

I grew up on the stories of Grandpa Spot and Nana Rae's childhood together as newsies, Papa Beau's journey from their farm in Mississippi to Brooklyn, Papa Cap's adventures as one of the famed Pinkerton Detectives, Uncle Peb's escapades in the Navy and Uncle Jackson's exploits as a pilot in the Great War. I wanted to do something with my life that mattered...I wanted to be somebody. I didn't want to just be another housewife like my mother or aunts. Cooking made me lose my appetite and cleaning bored me and my sewing, well, I won't even tell you how bad that was.

What I would rather do was join my male cousins in a game of baseball, though in the beginning I wasn't very good. That was until Uncle Johnny took me under his wing and became my own personal coach. By the age of fifteen, I was a better than most of my cousins and the neighborhood boys made a big show of not wanting me on their team whenever they played against a new team. But what they really wanted to do was knock the socks off the other team with how good I was. I may have been tiny, but I had surprising strength. Uncle Johnny told me that if I had been a boy I would have made the pros for sure!

But that wasn't what I wanted to hear. It just wasn't fair that because I was a girl I couldn't play baseball professionally. I was just as good as they were! I knew because Uncle Johnny had been friends with several of the Yankees players for a number of years and I was sometimes invited to practice with them. Mama wasn't really too happy about that, but I did it anyway. I just wanted to play ball.

One day one of the Yankees players told me about how he came up from a farm league. I knew then what I had to do! I had to run away, pretend to be a boy and get on one of the farm teams. And that's just what I did. Since most of the farm teams didn't have locker rooms it was easy enough to keep my identity hidden. But it didn't take long for Daddy to find me. I looked up during one game to see him in the stands giving me that look that he had long ago perfected, but he didn't pull me from the game. I played harder that game than I ever had before. After the game he took me to his hotel room and gave me a whipping that I wasn't soon to forget. Looking back I can't say that I didn't deserve it.

After that Mama and Daddy limited my time with the baseball players as much as they possibly could. Much to the displeasure of my parents I insisted on playing baseball in college. There were only a few women's teams in colleges in those days, and I insisted on going to one of them. But in 1943, when I was twenty-one, I heard through my connections with the Yankees about the new All-American Girls Baseball League. See, with all the men going off to war, the team owners wanted a way to keep baseball alive while they were gone. At last a way to professionally play the game that I loved! Seeing as I was of age, I didn't ask my parents' permission, I simply told them that I was going.

I easily made one of the teams and was soon traveling around playing eight games a week. I was on cloud nine playing a game that I loved and was good at. Don't get me wrong, we didn't just play ball...we also had to go to charm school and dress a certain way. There were strict guidelines as to how we wore our hair, which had to be kept long, and makeup. We even had chaperones that traveled with us. I could handle all that to be allowed to play baseball. Everywhere we went we were treated like celebrities...we were the heroines of every little girl, and most of their mothers too.

Over the first couple of years several girls left the teams to get married or start families and I scoffed at them all. I mean, did they even realize what they were giving up? We were born for this...and we were making 55 a week! That kind of money went a long way! But then one day it happened to me too. I had been playing in the league for about five years at that point. By then the men had returned from war and, like in the factories, women had stepped off the field for the men to play once again. At least we were lucky that the owners wanted to try and keep women's baseball alive.

Some of the returning players were curious and came to watch us play...and on that particular day I glanced at the stands as I always did as I came up to bat and there he was staring back at me. I'm not even really sure how long we stood there staring at each other, but once I got to the plate the first two pitches were strikes. I didn't know who this man was, but he had managed to throw off my game. Glaring up at him and pulling my cap tighter on my head, I turned back to the pitcher and knocked the next ball clear out of the park with the bases loaded! That ought to show those men!

He was waiting for me outside the locker room after the game, wanting to take me out to eat. He had even gone to the team chaperone for permission! Of all the nerve! I went with him and actually had a good time, even though I had tried to convince myself that I wouldn't. It soon became a tradition that anytime we were in the same town for a game we would meet up for food. Then one day Brad asked me if I knew a Wayne Conlon that had played in a farm league for a very short time. We both had a good laugh as I told him that Wayne Conlon and I were one and the same. Our friendship slowly deepened and then grew into love.

Mama threw a fit and Nana merely laughed, but Brad and I were married on a baseball diamond with our teammates as our attendants. I didn't wear a traditional wedding dress...one of my teammates made me a white version of our short-skirted baseball uniforms, though I did agree to wear the pearls that both Nana and Mama wore on their wedding days. After the ceremony, we played a game of baseball...his team against mine. And can you guess who won that game?


	4. Hannah Missouri Wayne

Hannah Missouri Wayne

I am the daughter of the infamous Rae Kelly and Beauregard Wayne…and let me tell you, that wasn't always an easy thing. My mother was known for her temper and Daddy…well, Daddy could be almost as bad. Don't get me wrong, they were the best parents a girl could ask for and I rarely saw the bad side of their tempers. That side was usually reserved for my younger twin brothers, mostly Mason. He looked like Daddy but was as wild as Mama had been when she was a child. Poppa said Mama deserved five more just like him for all the trouble she and her friends caused him growing up. Well, that's another story.

When I was younger there was a boy in our neighborhood named Liam who was good friends with my adopted cousin Kael. They were practically inseparable even though he was two years older than Kael. Seeing as my daddy and Uncle Johnny were very close, Kael was at our house almost as much as he was at his own, which meant I got to see a lot of Liam. Looking back, I think I knew even at the age of eleven that I would marry Liam one day. But, I'm getting ahead of myself…I'm bad about that.

That was about a year after Daddy had an accident at work and spent several months in bed barely able to walk. As Daddy was nearing the end of his recovery Liam started spending more time at our house, even when Kael wasn't there. Sometimes Liam would stay for dinner and go home when Mama would send us kids to bed…and I even remember a time or two when he was there for breakfast before school. Mama and Daddy never seemed to mind that he was at our house more than his own…and they never said anything when Liam would show up looking like he had been in a fight. Mama would just patch him up quietly and feed him or let him take a nap on the couch.

One night I heard something on the fire escape outside my window and when I got up to look, there was Liam curled up trying to stay warm. He begged me not to get my parents, but I did give him my blanket to help stay warm. Come to find out that the people he had thought were his parents were actually his birth mother's parents and they took him from his father when he was almost three after his mother had died. His birth father drank away the next ten years and then showed up wanting his son back. Liam had gone, thinking that it would get him away from his grandparents who beat him regularly. Only he hadn't counted on meeting his match on stubbornness with the father he had never known. His birth father was Liam "Spot" Conlon, one of Mama's childhood friends. I think she was mad at herself for not seeing it before then.

As the weather grew even colder, he stopped simply sleeping on the fire escape when he needed to get away from his father. He now would climb through my window and go downstairs and settle himself on the couch for the night with the blanket that Mama, Aunt North and Nana had made just for him. I had always wondered why he left it at our house instead of taking it home. I guess Mama and Daddy had given him permission to come inside, because they never told him to stop. Although when I turned thirteen they did give him his own key to the house. I started missing the whispered conversations we sometimes had before he would go downstairs.

It was several years later before I heard the old familiar noise of him climbing the fire escape and settling down under my window. I was eighteen and we had been courting for two years. Confused, I hurried to the window and opened it. Sure enough, there was my Liam kneeling outside my window. It was the moment I had been dreaming of! He had come to ask me to marry him…and of course, I said yes! How could I not say yes? I wanted to be married in Mama's wedding dress, but it had not survived four very curious children, so my cousin Callie graciously offered me the dress she had made for her own wedding before her beloved died during the war.

A pleasant surprise greeted me on the morning on my wedding. My mother's older brother, my adored Uncle Peb, had come to see me marry my sweetheart. And to my even greater surprise, he had brought me a gown from Paris to wear on my special day. It was to be a day full of surprises, for Mama gave me a strand of pearls that she had worn on her wedding day. They had been given to her by Papa's mother only a few months Mama married Daddy. Later that day when I walked to meet my groom I felt almost like a princess in the fairy tales that Daddy had read to me when I was little.


	5. Alana Rae Kelly

When I first met Beauregard Wayne, I hated him. I wanted nothing to do with him and did everything in my power to avoid him. You see, at the time I just wanted to be left alone. I didn't want anything to do with anyone and I was perfectly happy if my whole day went by without speaking to a single person. That all changed when my conscience got the better of me and I rescued Beau's baby sister Ginny from being run over by a wagon after she fell into the mud. Of course, as my luck would have it, she had wondered off from her family and I was now stuck with her.

A few days later she took off running and I followed, hoping to keep her from getting hurt…but she had suddenly remembered that her family was nearby and we found all eight of them huddled together in an alley. The young man that stood and came over to us was the tallest person I had ever seen…and the biggest. He looked like he could have easily lifted the four youngest of them at the same time without a problem. My problem was that he was also the best looking young man I had ever seen. I wasn't one to swoon over every looking young man I saw…most didn't even make me turn for a second glance, but there was something about this one. And I knew I was in trouble because I had lost the ability to think before I spoke and offered to help them find a place to love…in my building no less. I should have walked away as soon as I saw that tiny girl jump into his big arms and nearly disappear when he hugged her.

They moved into the flat below mine and that was the beginning of my downfall. He slowly broke through my defenses by asking me to babysit or inviting me to join them at the park or, worst of all, bringing me food. One of his sisters was an amazing cook and he was always bringing food by to tempt me with. I had never eaten so well in my life.

I'm still not sure to this day how we managed to go from acquaintances to friends to sweethearts without my realizing it, but sure enough we did. But one day I realized that I loved him and that I would be content spending the rest of my life with him. Believe me, falling in love had been the last thing on my mind.

Beau was having a hard time trying to work to support his family as well as raise the younger ones. So my adopted father bought a big house and allowed Beau and his siblings to move in with us until they got on their feet. Until that point Beau and I had only talked about getting married one day, but I knew that he wanted to make sure that his family was well cared for before he would feel comfortable with getting married. And I was perfectly fine with that…this whole thing was still new and confusing to me and I didn't want to rush either.

Then one day Cap's mother came to see me with a gift. I suppose that she would have been considered my grandmother, but to me she had always been a friend. Her gift to me was a strand of pearls that had belonged to her own mother. I had held jewels as fine as this in my hands during my days as a thief, but I never had they actually belonged to me, a orphaned child of the streets. I wore them for the first time a few months later…on my wedding day.


	6. Martha Ann Cole

My name was Martha Ann Cole, but few know me by that name. On the stage I was known as Medda Larkson, the Swedish Meadowlark. My parents must be rolling over in their graves at what I have become. I'm not really proud of myself either.

Maybe I should go back a bit. My parents died when I was fifteen and I took my mother's pearls and ran to New York to the man I thought loved me. He didn't marry me, but offered to let me live with him. About a year later we had a baby; a beautiful son that I named Daniel.

Then one day a short time later my lover simply didn't come home. After several days of little food, I knew that I had to get a job. I had no training, but I could sing, so I took a job on the stage. It was not on a grand stage in front of well dressed people, on this stage the men in the audience were not impressed by my voice, but with how little I wore. I paraded my body on stage while my precious baby slept in the dressing room.

Some time over the next couple of years I lost sight of why I was on that stage. It was no longer about that darling boy sleeping in the dressing room, but about the money I was making and the little fame I had gotten among the bawdy houses in Manhattan. I could perform in any of them that I wanted and when one offered me a better deal, I would move to a new theatre. By the time my little boy was seven, he had taken it upon himself to earn money so that he could eat, because I had often forgotten to bring him food or give him money.

When he was eight I did the thing that I regret most. I agreed to go on a tour of the country with a man who would not allow me to bring my son along. So I left little Daniel alone on the streets of the cruel city. This was the biggest mistake I had ever made, though I didn't realize it until later.

I had never forgotten about my son and everywhere I looked I saw his face. After I returned some years later and it was my Daniel who found me. He was quite grown and had taken over the care of a baby girl that was left on the doorstep of the building where he lived. We never again had the close relationship that we had once had, but he did keep in contact and allowed me to spend time with that precious little girl…and later her friends among the newsies. When I bought my own theatre, I made sure my employees knew that the newsies were always welcome. I suppose it was my way of trying to make up for what I had done to my son. Perhaps when Rae is old enough I shall give her my mother's pearls as I shall never have a daughter of my own to pass them on to.

--The End--

Author's Note: Hope you all enjoyed this little story. I've been trying to work on my narration and this story started as an exercise to do just that. However, I enjoyed writing it so much that I decided to write another one. The next one will be all original characters...involving the descendants of a sibling of the man Rae married. Be looking for it soon...


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